by Franz Kafka
The old merchant, a huge man, his knees giving way beneath him, mounted the stairs to his room, not holding the banister but rather pressing against it with his hand. He was about to take his keys out of his trouser pocket, as he always did, in front of the door to the room, a latticed glass door, when he noticed in a dark corner a young man who now bowed.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’ asked the merchant, still groaning from the exertion of the climb.
‘Are you the merchant Messner?’ the young man asked.
‘Yes,’ said the merchant.
‘Then I have some information for you. Who I am is really beside the point here, for I myself have no part at all in the matter, am only delivering the message. Nevertheless I will introduce myself, my name is Kette and I am a student.’
‘So,’ said Messner, considering this for a moment. ‘Well, and the message?’ he then said.
‘We can discuss that better in your room,’ said the student. ‘It is something that can’t be disposed of on the stairs.’
‘I didn’t know that I was to receive any such message,’ said Messner, and looked out of the corner of his eye at the floor.
‘That may be,’ said the student.
‘Besides,’ said Messner, ‘it is past eleven o’clock now, no one will overhear us here.’
‘No,’ the student replied, ‘it is impossible for me to say it here.’
‘And I,’ said Messner, ‘do not receive guests at night,’ and he stuck the key into the lock so violently that the other keys in the bunch continued to jingle for a while.
‘Now look, I’ve been waiting here since eight o’clock, three hours,’ said the student.
‘That only proves that the message is important to you. But I don’t want to receive any messages. Every message that I am spared is a gain, I am not curious, only go, go.’ He took the student by his thin overcoat and pushed him away a little. Then he partly opened the door and tremendous heat flowed from the room into the cold hall. ‘Besides, is it a business message?’ he asked further, when he was already standing in the open doorway.
‘That too I cannot say here,’ said the student.
‘Then I wish you good night,’ said Messner, went into his room, locked the door with the key, turned on the light of the electric bed-lamp, filled a small glass at a little wall cabinet in which were several bottles of liquor, emptied it with a smack of his lips, and began to undress. Leaning back against the high pillows, he was on the point of beginning to read a newspaper when it seemed to him that someone was knocking softly on the door. He laid the newspaper back on the bed cover, crossed his arms, and listened. And in fact the knock was repeated, very softly and as though down very low on the door. ‘A really impertinent puppy,’ laughed Messner. When the knocking stopped, he again picked up the newspaper. But now the knocking came more strongly, there was a real banging on the door. The knocking came the way children at play scatter their knocks over the whole door, now down low, dull against the wood, now up high, clear against the glass. ‘I shall have to get up,’ Messner thought, shaking his head. ‘I can’t telephone the housekeeper because the instrument is over there in the ante-room and I should have to wake the landlady to get to it. There’s nothing else I can do except to throw the boy down the stairs myself.’ He pulled a felt cap over his head, threw back the cover, pulled himself to the edge of the bed with his weight on his hands, slowly put his feet on the floor, and pulled on high, quilted slippers. ‘Well now,’ he thought, and, chewing his upper lip, stared at the door; ‘now it is quiet again. But I must have peace once and for all,’ he then said to himself, pulled a stick with a horn knob out of a stand, held it by the middle, and went to the door.
‘Is anyone still out there?’ he asked through the closed door.
‘Yes,’ came the answer. ‘Please open the door for me.’
‘I’ll open it,’ said Messner, opened the door and stepped out holding the stick.
‘Don’t hit me,’ said the student threateningly, and took a step backward.
‘Then go!’ said Messner, and pointed his index finger in the direction of the stairs.
‘But I can’t,’ said the student, and ran up to Messner so surprisingly –
27 November. I must stop without actually being shaken off. Nor do I feel any danger that I might get lost, still, I feel helpless and an outsider. The firmness, however, which the most insignificant writing brings about in me is beyond doubt and wonderful. The comprehensive view I had of everything on my walk yesterday!
The child of the housekeeper who opened the gate. Bundled up in a woman’s old shawl, pale, numb, fleshy little face. At night is carried to the gate like that by the housekeeper.
The housekeeper’s poodle that sits downstairs on a step and listens when I begin tramping down from the fourth floor, looks at me when I pass by. Pleasant feeling of intimacy, since he is not frightened by me and includes me in the familiar house and its noise.
Picture: Baptism of the cabin boys when crossing the equator. The sailors lounging around. The ship, clambered over in every direction and at every level, everywhere provides them with places to sit. The tall sailors hanging on the ship’s ladders, one foot in front of the other, pressing their powerful, round shoulders against the side of the ship and looking down on the play.
[A small room. ELSA and GERTRUD are sitting at the window with their needlework. It is beginning to get dark.]
E: Someone is ringing. [Both listen.]
G: Was there really a ring? I didn’t hear anything, I keep hearing less all the time.
E: It was just very low. [Goes into the ante-room to open the door. A few words are exchanged. Then the voice.]
E: Please step in here. Be careful not to stumble. Please walk ahead, there’s only my sister in the room.
Recently the cattle-dealer Morsin told us the following story. He was still excited when he told it, despite the fact that the matter is several months old now:
‘I very often have business in the city, on the average it certainly comes to ten days a month. Since I must usually spend the night there too, and have always tried, whenever it is at all possible, to avoid stopping at a hotel, I rented a private room that simply –’
4 December. Viewed from the outside it is terrible for a young but mature person to die, or worse, to kill himself. Hopelessly to depart in a complete confusion that would make sense only within a further development, or with the sole hope that in the great account this appearance in life will be considered as not having taken place. Such would be my plight now. To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.
A group of men, masters and servants. Rough-hewn faces shining with living colours. The master sits down and the servant brings him food on a tray. Between the two there is no greater difference, no difference of another category than, for instance, that between a man who as a result of countless circumstances is an Englishman and lives in London, and another who is a Laplander and at the very same instant is sailing on the sea, alone in his boat during a storm. Certainly the servant can – and this only under certain conditions – become a master, but this question, no matter how it may be answered, does not change anything here, for this is a matter that concerns the present evaluation of a present situation.
The unity of mankind, now and then doubted, even if only emotionally, by everyone, even by the most approachable and adaptable person, on the other hand also reveals itself to everyone, or seems to reveal itself, in the complete harmony, discernible time and again, between the development of mankind as a whole and of the individual man. Even in the most secret emotions of the individual.
The fear of folly. To see folly in every emotion that strives straight ahead and makes one forget everything e
lse. What, then, is non-folly? Non-folly is to stand like a beggar before the threshold, to one side of the entrance, to rot and collapse. But P. and O. are really disgusting fools. There must be follies greater than those who perpetrate them. What is disgusting, perhaps, is this puffing-themselves-up of the little fools in their great folly. But did not Christ appear in the same light to the Pharisees?
Wonderful, entirely self-contradictory idea that someone who died at 3 a.m., for instance, immediately thereafter, about dawn, enters into a higher life. What incompatibility there is between the visibly human and everything else! How out of one mystery there always comes a greater one! In the first moment the breath leaves the human calculator. Really one should be afraid to step out of one’s house.
5 December. How furious I am with my mother! I need only begin to talk to her and I am irritated, almost scream.
O. is really suffering and I do not believe that she is suffering, that she is capable of suffering, do not believe it in the face of my knowing better, do not believe it in order not to have to stand by her, which I could not do, for she irritates me too.
Externally I see only little details of F., at least sometimes, so few they may be counted. By these her picture is made clear, pure, original, distinct, and lofty, all at once.
8 December. Artificial constructions in Weiss’s novel. The strength to abolish them, the duty to do so. I almost deny experience. I want peace, step by step or running, but not calculated leaps by grasshoppers.
9 December. Weiss’s Galeere. Weakening of the effect when the end of the story begins. The world is conquered and we have watched it with open eyes. We can therefore quietly turn away and live on.
Hatred of active introspection. Explanations of one’s soul, such as: Yesterday I was so, and for this reason; today I am so, and for this reason. It is not true, not for this reason and not for that reason, and therefore also not so and so. To put up with oneself calmly, without being precipitate, to live as one must, not to chase one’s tail like a dog.
I fell asleep in the underbush. A noise awakened me. I found in my hands a book in which I had previously been reading. I threw it away and sprang up. It was shortly after midday; in front of the hill on which I stood there lay spread out a great lowland with villages and ponds and uniformly shaped, tall, reed-like hedges between them. I put my hands on my hips, examined everything with my eyes, and at the same time listened to the noise.
10 December. Discoveries have forced themselves on people.
The laughing, boyish, sly, revealing face of the chief inspector, a face that I have never before seen him wear and noticed only today at the moment when I was reading him a report by the director and happened to glance up from it. At the same time he also stuck his right hand into his trouser pocket with a shrug of his shoulder as though he were another person.
It is never possible to take note of and evaluate all the circumstances that influence the mood of the moment, are even at work within it, and Anally are at work in the evaluation, hence it is false to say that I felt resolute yesterday, that I am in despair today. Such differentiations only prove that one desires to influence oneself, and, as far removed from oneself as possible, hidden behind prejudices and fantasies, temporarily to create an artificial life, as sometimes someone in the corner of a tavern, sufficiently concealed behind a small glass of whisky, entirely alone with himself, entertains himself with nothing but false, unprovable imaginings and dreams.
Towards midnight a young man in a tight, pale-grey, checked overcoat sprinkled with snow came down the stairs into the little music hall. He paid his admission at the cashier’s desk behind which a dozing young lady started up and looked straight at him with large, black eyes, and then he stopped for a moment to survey the hall lying three steps below him.
Almost every evening I go to the railway station; today, because it was raining, I walked up and down the hall there for half an hour. The boy who kept eating candy from the slot machine. His reaching into his pocket, out of which he pulls a pile of change, the careless dropping of a coin into the slot, reading the labels while he eats, the dropping of some pieces which he picks up from the dirty floor and sticks right into his mouth. The man, calmly chewing, who is speaking confidentially at the window with a woman, a relative.
11 December. In Toynbee Hall read the beginning of Michael Kohlhaas. Complete and utter fiasco. Badly chosen, badly presented, finally swam senselessly around in the text. Model audience. Very small boys in the front row. One of them tries to overcome his innocent boredom by carefully throwing his cap on the floor and then carefully picking it up, and then again, over and over. Since he is too small to accomplish this from his seat, he has to keep sliding off the chair a little. Read wildly and badly and carelessly and unintelligibly. And in the afternoon I was already trembling with eagerness to read, could hardly keep my mouth shut.
No push is really needed, only a withdrawal of the last force placed at my disposal, and I fall into a despair that rips me to pieces. Today, when I imagined that I would certainly be calm during the lecture, I asked myself what sort of calm this would be, on what it would be based, and I could only say that it would merely be a calm for its own sake, an incomprehensible grace, nothing else.
12 December. And in the morning I got up relatively quite fresh.
Yesterday, on my way home, the little boy bundled in grey who was running along beside a group of boys, hitting himself on the thigh, catching hold of another boy with his other hand, and shouting – rather absentmindedly, which I must not forget – ‘Dnes to bylo docela hezky’ [‘Very nicely done today’].62
The freshness with which, after a somewhat altered division of the day, I walked along the street about six o’clock today. Ridiculous observation, when will I get rid of this habit.
I looked closely at myself in the mirror a while ago – though only by artificial light and with the light coming from behind me, so that actually only the down at the edges of my ears was illuminated – and my face, even after fairly close examination, appeared to me better than I know it to be. A clear, well-shaped, almost beautifully outlined face. The black of the hair, the brows and the eye sockets stand livingly forth from the rest of the passive mass. The glance is by no means haggard, there is no trace of that, but neither is it childish, rather unbelievably energetic, but perhaps only because it was observing me, since I was just then observing myself and wanted to frighten myself.
12 December. Yesterday did not fall asleep for a long time. F. B. Finally decided – and with that I fell uncertainly asleep – to ask Weiss to go to her office with a letter, and to write nothing else in this letter other than that I must have news from her or about her and have therefore sent Weiss there so that he might write to me about her. Meanwhile Weiss is sitting beside her desk, waits until she has finished reading the letter, bows, and – since he has no further instructions and it is highly unlikely that he will receive an answer – leaves.
Discussion evening at the officials’ club. I presided. Funny, what sources of self-respect one can draw upon. My introductory sentence: ‘I must begin the discussion this evening with a regret that it is taking place.’ For I was not advised in time and therefore not prepared.
14 December. Lecture by Beerman. Nothing, but presented with a self-satisfaction that is here and there contagious. Girlish face with a goitre. Before almost every sentence the same contraction of muscles in his face as in sneezing. A verse from the Christmas Fair in his newspaper column today.
Sir, buy it for your little lad
So he’ll laugh and not be sad.
Quoted Shaw: ‘I am a sedentary, faint-hearted civilian.’
Wrote a letter to F. in the office.
The fright this morning on the way to the office when I met the girl from the seminar who resembles F., for the moment did not know who it was and simply saw that she resembled F., was not F., but had some sort of further relationship to F. beyond that, namely this, that in the seminar, at the sight of her
, I thought of F. a great deal.
Now read in Dostoyevsky the passage that reminds me so of my ‘being unhappy’.
When I put my left hand inside my trousers while I was reading and felt the lukewarm upper part of my thigh.
15 December. Letters to Dr Weiss and Uncle Alfred. No telegram came.
Read Wir Jungen von 1870–1. Again read with suppressed sobs of the victories and scenes of enthusiasm. To be a father and speak calmly to one’s son. For this, however, one shouldn’t have a little toy hammer in place of a heart.